Film puts Russian 'Forbidden Art' in spotlight

Friday

Nov 9, 2012 at 6:00 AM

By Richard Duckett TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

In Nukus, the capital city of Karakalpakstan, an independent republic inside Uzbekistan, is the Nukus Museum, which holds an amazing collection of Russian avant-garde art from the 1920s and '30s, most of it forbidden by the grim and forbidding Soviet cultural czars of the Stalin years.

Karakalpakstan is so far and so many deserts beyond Moscow that Igor Savitsky, who aspired to be an artist but became perhaps one of the most unusual and daring art collectors of all time, was able to build his museum right under the noses of Soviet authorities. The museum even opened with state subsidies — albeit under the pretext of cultivating a folk-art collection.

The carefully put together documentary “The Desert of Forbidden Art,” currently making its area premiere as part of the Cinema 320 series at Clark University, tells this story in an absorbing way and is maybe at its best when it lets the art do the talking. The camera lingers often on wonderful creations by artists such as Alexander Volkov and Mikhail Kurzin. Then comes the sting. Volkov was condemned as anticommunist because his work did not conform to “Socialist Realism” and lived his final years in full isolation having lost his teaching posts and all his money. On similar charges, Kurzin was arrested and imprisoned.

The documentary's directors, Amanda Pope and Tchavdar Georgiev, have done plenty of legwork in addition to admiring the brushwork. The film has interviews with relatives of the artists, archival footage, and Ben Kingsley, Ed Asner and Sally Field narrate the diaries and letters of Savitsky, the artists, and other players in this drama.

Igor Savistky was born in 1915 in Kiev, then part of Russia, to a pretty well-to-do family and had a French nanny. The canvas was rapidly about to change, however, and as Savitsky grew up he learned fast. Coming of age in the chaotic and then brutally totalitarian years after the Russian Revolution, he chose to become an electrician so that he would seem “proletarian” in the Soviet Union. “But I dreamed of being an artist,” he once wrote. That dream wouldn't quite come true. But his attraction to art and his innate cleverness did much to preserve the work of artists that might have otherwise been obliterated in the name of Socialist Realism. That kind of “realism” is the epitome of totalitarian art with smiling faces united in doing good for the dictator smiling benevolently back at them. Nothing unorthodox can be tolerated. You can see similar sanctioned artwork from the Nazi years in Germany, and even in today's “strong man” countries from North Korea to Syria.

According to “The Desert of Forbidden Art,” Savitsky's ability to draw landed him on an archeological expedition in Karakalpakstan. A decade or so earlier a number of Russian artists had settled there and their modernistic leanings melded with the area's Islamic culture to create strikingly original, haunting and beautiful work.

But unlike Savitsky a few years later, the artists were found out. They were out of sync with the official line. “The artist has gone astray” was one indictment. As the documentary makes clear, betrayal by fellow artists was not unheard of, while some artists toed the line to save their skins and way of living. For others there was imprisonment Perhaps worst of all was being denied any opportunity to make and sustain a living after condemnation had stamped them down. Meanwhile, their work appeared lost. But not quite.

“I found these paintings rolled up under the beds of old widows, buried in family trash, in dark corners of artists' studios, sometimes even patching a hole in the roof,” Savitsky wrote. He became a man obsessed, rescuing 40,000 works, and traveling long distances to bring them “home.”

Savitsky died in 1984, and one thing the documentary might have delineated more and even pondered is time lines and the cultural and political progression along them. Life for the artist under Stalin (and most Russians, for that matter) was a paranoid horror world. But did that start to change, ever so slightly, after his death? Is that what helped Savitsky set up his museum and amass his collection? Was something unthinkable under Stalin more feasible under Khrushchev?

A film of this nature inevitably is going to have a talking heads aspect to it, and this does, but Pope and Georgiev are good editors.

And “The Desert of Forbidden Art” carries another sting in its tail. We learn that a strain of Islamic cultural intolerance is on the rise in Karakalpakstan. On the other hand, we see auctions and the new world of well-heeled collectors, Russian and otherwise, who are much less artistically inspired than Savitsky but prepared to “invest” millions of dollars on works by artists who died penniless.

“The Desert of Forbidden Art” will be shown again in Room 320 of the Jefferson Academic Center, Clark University, at 7:30 p.m. tonight and Saturday, and 1 and 2:40 p.m. Sunday.